Companies Team up to Address Issues With Multiple Clouds

The impact of cloud is undeniable to both businesses and IT. Cloud has ushered in a new level of agility for organizations and transformed the way applications are built, run, managed, and delivered. As businesses increase their use of cloud computing and utilize multiple cloud providers, they naturally experience increased complexity and risk associated with diverse infrastructures, management tools, and processes. VMware estimates that nearly two-thirds of the market will utilize two or more cloud service providers in addition to their on-premises data centers. To address these issues with multiple clouds, VMware and Amazon Web Services (AWS) teamed up to create VMware Cloud on AWS.

Last year, the service launched in two AWS regions: U.S. East (Northern Virginia) and U.S. West (Oregon). Now, the two companies have released their third major update of VMware Cloud on AWS in just six months. The service is currently available in AWS’s London region with additional expansion planned for Europe and Asia this year.

“We’ve been very pragmatic and customer-driven in selecting which geographies we expand to,” said Chris Wolf, chief technology officer for global field and industry at VMware. “And we’ve been consistent in our approach that if something is available in one location, it’s available in all locations.”

What Is VMware Cloud on AWS?VMware Cloud on AWS is an on-demand service that enables businesses to run applications across VMware vSphere-based cloud environments with access to a broad range of AWS services. Bringing together the best of VMware’s private-cloud expertise and AWS’s public-cloud capabilities, VMware Cloud on AWS offers companies an operationally consistent way to run, manage, and secure applications in a hybrid cloud. With this service, IT teams can manage their cloud-based resources with familiar VMware tools.

“On-demand disaster recovery as a service, data center extension, and cloud migration—ranging from a single application to entire data centers—are three of the primary reasons we’ve seen companies turning to VMware Cloud on AWS,” says Joe Baguley, VMware’s vice president and chief technology officer for EMEA. “Using globally consistent infrastructure leads to globally consistent operations, and allows teams to use the same tool sets and skill sets to unlock efficiencies and enable new capabilities.”

“For example, companies can take their existing apps, package them up, ship them to AWS, and easily integrate them—all without the massive time and expense of refactoring every application. Organizations can easily move apps to the public cloud without rewriting a single line of code. It’s a huge win for our customers,” says Wolf.

New Locations, More Choices“The reasons behind expansions to specific geographies have less to do with the technology and more to do with issues regarding the law and latency,” says Baguley. “There is a diversity of privacy and legal requirements across different countries, which often means data needs to be secured locally. And for customers who have latency issues in their business, they want to get as close to the data as possible.”

“The VMware cloud strategy is all about flexibility for enterprises, enabling them to run their apps when and wherever they want to. It’s about giving businesses the consistency and control needed to leverage a variety of clouds. And it concerns itself with security across clouds, helping companies eliminate unnecessary risk,” says Wolf.

In addition to the new capabilities and locations, VMware has also expanded the set of services and partners that support VMware Cloud on AWS and related solutions. For example, VMware’s Hybrid Cloud Extension solution can be used to bulk migrate workloads between data centers or between clouds.

“A couple of weeks ago, a retail customer used the service to live migrate virtual machines (VMs) from a private data center to VMware Cloud on AWS,” says Wolf. “And that’s only one service. Our Cost Insight solution is taking the educated guesswork out of cloud migration planning by learning how an application behaves over the network and modeling the associated network egress costs in a public cloud. And our Wavefront solution provides a rich set of analytics, providing deep visibility into critical cloud services such as AWS Lambda.”

Along with providing technical opportunities and advantages, both VMware and AWS are committed to building and supporting a rich ecosystem for customers.

“We also have a vast range of service partner providers who have all been qualified, so there’s a high degree of assurance for our customers,” says Wolf. “Our partners provide additional capabilities for our customers who might have needs specific to healthcare, or who need a certain expertise to meet regulatory or data sovereignty requirements.”

“This is what smart companies are doing. Committing to infrastructure as code and maintaining consistent operations across environments not only makes enterprises more efficient,” says Wolf, “it also frees up software developers to innovate and gives the company a solid foundation going forward so that when new technologies emerge, it’s easy to adjust and adopt new frameworks.”